Iqra’i

Just as TKB and The Reactionary Epicurean are disputing the level of barbarism entailed in the Olympics, I come upon this gem from Simon Barnes at The Times. When it comes to the subject of doping, TKB takes The Economist as her crib to applaud gene doping, while the Transhumanist Epicurean agrees that gene doping consists of using our “God-given Reason (a part of our Nature) to tweak our God-given Bodies (another part of our Nature)”. Where Barnes goes further than them, however, is in his presentation of the arguments for allowing even those performance enhancers that will cause long term damage to the athlete’s health and life expectancy: “Normally, someone who knowingly does something dangerous in order to achieve great things is regarded as a bit of a hero…so isn’t someone who knowingly takes a dangerous drug to win a gold medal for his country also a hero?” I would agree with his logic if it weren’t for the nagging feeling that the real beauty of the Olympics is that, whatever we pretend, it is not a celebration of the collectivist spirit. It’s about the triumph of the individual will, whatever coloured labels those individuals stick on their backs in return for a bit of cash and support. Indeed, it’s the athletes whose lives do become enslaved to the good of the nation whose stories most sully the reputation of the Games.

Nonetheless, one can be sympathetic to Barnes’ point on individualistic grounds. The achievement of excellence at extreme personal cost is truly heroic according to our traditional conceptions, even when it entails no shared benefits beyond the agent. That’s why Achilles is the foundational hero of the West, and even Macbeth compels our sympathy. Pushing your body to the limit has always been par for the course for athletes - hence the high injury rate - and no one has ever denied that overly building up one aspect of your physique will actually damage your life expectancy. Just look what happens when supermen retire and run to seed. More seriously, we allow people to make their own choice between health and buzz when we let them buy cigarettes and alcohol (yes, you can sell yourself into slavery). But where Simon Barnes is at his most compelling is in his very first paragraph. ‘The worst decision sport ever made was to start testing for drugs. Once they began to catch the cheats, all hell broke out and we began to lose the faith…Now the world is full of people declaring that they don’t care who wins what at the Olympic Games, because “they’re all on something”.’ Constant obsession about drugs takes the magic out of sport. The Tour de France, after all, was created precisely as a superhuman contest that no one was ever expected to endure without boosting their performance artificially - in the good old days, long before doping tests, the athletes were all known to be on cocaine, but people still wondered at and lauded them, because their achievements were so unnatural as to be miraculous. Once we accept that we can’t stop people doping, the less active 99.99% of us might just be content to sit back in our armchairs and watch the sheer spectacle of athletes transgressing the frail limitations of this too too solid flesh.

Which leads me back to the real point at issue between TKB and the Epicurean. For TKB, the Olympics represents “a collective unwillingness to abandon the mud from which we rose”. But her opponent counters that “they represent striving and excellence, not wallowing in our filth. Tacky, contrived, commercialized striving to be sure; but striving nonetheless.” This is precisely why the Olympics is a mark of a civilised world. I say this grudgingly - as a hopelessly nerdy, library-inhabiting child, I watched the sporty girls with a mixture of disdain and envy, asking myself why anyone could take pride in success on the netball field when reading Milton was evidently of far more practical value, because it was a real tool for understanding the world and living the examined life. Yet it’s precisely in celebrating skills without immediate practical value that we demonstrate that we have developed beyond “pagan exhibitions of all that fascinates the reptilian brain within us”. The practical benefits that sports training can bring - teamwork, leadership, confidence and so forth - can only be discovered and harnessed after we’ve historically developed such training for its own sake, as any civilised society should the arts. This isn’t entirely modernistic either, for modernism has always enshrined a cult of utility. To the modernist, human experience only makes sense if there is a practical, evolutionary explanation for it. We no longer live in the pagan world in which one’s skill at the javelin directly correlates to the amount of food on one’s plate, although the biological determinists would surely have us return there. So at the Olympic level, such skills serve a purely aesthetic celebration. And if that aesthetic is one of transgressing humanity, then the Olympics must be an essentially transhumanist celebration.